|Hi folks
As always, I'm a day late and a dollar short in reading this topic. I love the Ken Burns documentaries because of their focus on the little guy. My dad would almost never talk about his service. He was part of the seemingly non existant 1251st Combat Engineers. Every D-day he would comment that the only mention in the paper was the annual by Charles Schulz in the comic strip "Peanuts". Pretty pathetic.
I was very lucky to have been a social worker at a nursing home for many years and really enjoyed talking to the folks. I have met Lizzie Bordens paper boy, a man that missed The Titanic (he had several newspaper articles about his lucky miss), One of Thomas Edisons secretaries and one of Ghoerings guards at Nuremberg. The guard was a member of my Civil War Roundtable and a group of us went to a local baseball game one night. I had been told he really didnt talk about it much, but during the 3rd or 4th inning I mentioned to him that I heard about his claim to fame and wanted to know his personal opinion of Ghoering. When I put it on his personal level and not as a moment of history, he talked about it for several minutes. I'm very glad that I got to know him before he passed away.